Cebes is doing something subtle here that deserves attention: he is not just restating the argument, he is tightening it. If knowing is remembering, then the soul must have been somewhere before it arrived in this body — and if it was somewhere before, it can be somewhere after. The geometry is clean, almost too clean. That cleanness is the tell.

Anamnesis as Plato deploys it is already a pneumatic move. Learning as recollection means the soul's true home is not here, not in the body, not in the friction of lived contact with things that resist and wound and change. It is elsewhere, in the company of the Forms, where the soul once dwelled in full possession of what it now only partially recovers. Every act of genuine understanding becomes, on this reading, a kind of ascent — a brief return to a cleaner altitude. The body is what makes you forget; thinking is what lets you leave it temporarily behind.

Watch what this costs. If knowing is vertical — a recovery of what you once possessed above — then nothing genuinely new can be learned from suffering, from the body's insistence, from what defeats you. The descent yields nothing the ascent has not already underwritten. Plato's proof of immortality is also, quietly, a proof that nothing below matters unless it points upward.